Conservatives plot on campaign finance

Encouraged by the U.S. Supreme Court, conservatives are launching a wholesale legal assault on campaign finance laws.

And among the leaders is a man once charged with enforcing those laws: former Federal Election Commission Chairman Bradley Smith.

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His goals are big. He doesn’t want to just scale back the laws; he wants to pretty much wipe them out.

“Are we better off with McCain-Feingold?” Smith asks. If it were overturned, he adds, “that would put us in a system that existed before Jack Abramoff, William Jefferson, Bob Ney, Mark Foley and Ted Stevens. Those scandals happened during the McCain-Feingold era.”

Since his resignation from the FEC in 2005, Smith returned to his teaching job at Capital University Law School in Columbus, Ohio, and opened the Center for Competitive Politics to build a case against the regulatory system that limits individual donations to candidates, reins in the role of outside groups, and bans union and corporate contributions to political parties.

Over lunch in Washington, Smith said the need for an anti-regulation center came to him while he was running the FEC, when reporters and congressional aides would call looking for someone who could balance the pro-regulation voices in news accounts and hearings.

Smith concluded that the anti-regulation crowd was failing in a number of other ways, too.

The pro-regulation crowd has advocacy groups to lobby Congress and whip up public support, legal centers to defend the laws, research organizations to gin out studies and stacks of public opinion polls to aid their cause.

The opposition amounted to a couple of conservatives or libertarians scattered in think tanks around town and, usually, the Republican Party. “Everyone just said they were tainted by industry donations,” Smith says.

With financial support that came largely from individuals he declines to name, Smith opened the Center for Competitive Politics a year later to begin challenging the current campaign finance system in both federal court and the court of public opinion. His first target is rules applying to independent, outside groups, not those imposed on candidates and political party committees.

Among his first legal cases is one on behalf of SpeechNow.org, which is challenging the federal contribution limits and disclosure requirements of independent organizations, the so-called 527s that popped up in the 2004 presidential campaign to run advertisements and conduct voter turnout operations.

From his seat on the FEC in 2004, Smith refused — to the dismay of the Bush-Cheney reelection team — to shut down those groups, largely based on First Amendment arguments.

For a time, he was the subject of a whisper campaign led by frustrated Republicans, who wrung their hands as billionaire investor George Soros donated millions of dollars to launch a handful of pro-Democratic 527 groups.